Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  Micky went in there and fought with Dave Hall. This was serious baboon stuff. He turns up and starts yelling at Dave that Dave had to go. He just couldn’t do this. This was corruption and this was the nadir of it all. They yelled and had fights and tantrums and threw things, and eventually Dave got up and left; the old buck had been pushed to one side. Now at this stage Micky was in his prime. He had a deadly rap; he’d get hold of this liberal, some hapless reporter from the Guardian or the Observer, and just start on them. Start soft and gentle and then gradually build up to this cascading crescendo of vehemence.

  I guess you can’t always do the right thing and come out smelling like Mary Poppins.

  As both a salve to my conscience and an extra motivation, I had another and more altruistic motive for moving in on IT. If it hadn’t been me, it might well have been Richard Neville. The grapevine had informed me that, not content with being the recognised editor and publisher of OZ, he was now dallying with a fantasy of carving out an underground media empire. Aside from the maxim we would learn in the Eighties – ‘Beware of Australians with publishing empires’ – I had always found Richard extremely contradictory. I couldn’t do otherwise than admire the courage he exhibited when the Schoolkids’ OZ bust came along. I freely admit that I would never have had either the style or the balls to show up at a court hearing in a gymslip. But even with this degree of respect, I could never figure out his real motives. The first issues of OZ were little more than sophomoric Kangaroo Valley versions of Private Eye, with a decidedly anti-freak bent. I can fully accept that Richard may have had his psychedelic road to Damascus, but after the world in which the original OZ apparently desired to function – that of Private Eye and the New Statesman – closed ranks against it, I always wondered if his sudden conversion to the hipster cause contained some element of following a market trend.

  A part of him gave the impression that he would have been perfectly happy with a TV talk show, like a velvet and less bestial Clive James. He affected the pose of the languid faux-Oxbridge wit, yet also worked in harness with Felix Dennis, who had all the finesse and room-devouring energy of Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons. In retrospect, I have to wonder if Felix really didn’t get the credit he was due for the courage and innovation at OZ. As many have learned to their cost, it’s a cardinal mistake ever to dismiss Felix Dennis as nothing more than a money-maker.

  I probably wouldn’t be discussing Neville if I hadn’t been hearing from Australia that he’s been recanting for more than a decade now, and if I hadn’t been so irritated by his 1995 memoir of the Sixties, Hippie Hippie Shake. In his lamentable book Richard pictures me as a thug with hopeless pretensions. At the same time he exhibits a deeply bizarre fascination with my footwear. Huh? I suppose I should have had an inkling of this one night in the early Seventies when he and his girlfriend Louise Ferrier came to dinner with Ingrid and me. He lingered over shelves of books that included Che, Mao, Fanon and Debray along with Robert Heinlein, Iceberg Slim and Marshall McLuhan. ‘Have you read all these?’

  The question was fatuous. What was my response supposed to be? ‘No, Richard, I just ran out and bought them to impress you with my radical chic.’

  Hippie Hippie Shake was silly, but I’d liked Richard and I always assumed he’d at least had a degree of respect for me. After discovering otherwise, I called Chris Rowley, who knew us both equally well. ‘Have you read this book of Neville’s?’

  Chris laughed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Forget about it. He resented you. You were the real thing.’

  I sighed and shrugged, but after decades I was reminded of my trepidation at the idea of Richard being in control of both IT and OZ. Mercifully I also heard that Felix quickly vetoed the scheme, not only convincing Richard it would just mean more debts and hungry printers to feed, but reminding him he was a lazy son-of-a-bitch when it came down to the routine grind. OZ might be able to meander out when it was good and ready, but IT was a bi-weekly newspaper. It came out on time, and was dependent on its dateline.

  At the time Edward and I went into gross tabloid mode, we were aware that Neville shared our enthusiasm for 144-point bold headlines. Australia, even more than the USA, is the spiritual home of the shrieking press. By going down that route we could not only get our graphic rocks off, but rub his nose in it at the same time. And, for the first time ever, IT had to survive completely on its own merits. No UFO Club or Nigel Samuel to subsidise it any more, and the laundering of herb money was a thing of the past. Without the gay ads, revenues had dropped and the circulation figures had fallen. With Friends, Rolling Stone, Gay News and a growing number of monthly hippie rock-mags coming onto the market, the competition for advertising was more intense than it had ever been. I’d also happily agreed that we’d drop the haphazard ‘What’s Happening’ section, which no one liked compiling or designing, so that Tony Elliot could get his London listings-magazine Time Out under way. That left us without even a service function in the capital city.

  We had no intention of abandoning the bedrock principles of agitation and aggression, but the fact was that we had to break even or die. We had to work according to a page budget dictated by advertising, and profile a target reader. As it turned out, the target reader was primarily male, an upmarket boggie with a disgruntled anger, a healthy dose of paranoia, a juvenile-delinquent obsession with sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, comic books and a tolerance for up-against-the-wall-motherfucker polemics. This long-haired demographic was as much justification as Edward and I needed to conduct our first tabloid experiments.

  And it wasn’t just a matter of large and loud schoolboy jape headlines. We balanced the features with a great deal of short, easy-read items in a form that greatly resembled the format USA Today believes it pioneered. Without fail, we ran a full two-page comic section, just like in the New York Daily News. The old guard at IT had sporadically published Gilbert Shelton’s Furry Freak Brothers, but the readers within our sights wanted the strip every week, complete with Fat Freddy’s Cat, easily found in every issue, and no excuses. We even had the equivalent of sports pages in our recreational drug coverage. As far as features went, we flung a wide net over the popular preoccupations. We covered animal rights and alchemy, the environment and assassination theories, mysticism and Marxism, mass murder and the atrocities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Heaven knows we had enough to write about. Nixon’s new drug war, Henry Kissinger’s geopolitics, the Manson family trial, the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the deteriorating situation in Iran and the heroin it brought with it, civil war in Belfast and Derry, John Lennon’s Green Card, the extermination of the Black Panthers and the suicidal tendencies of the Weather Underground were all consistently reported. We sought the thoughts of Pete Townshend, Allen Ginsberg, Bobby Seale and guys doing thirty years in a Turkish jail. The perennial William Burroughs clued us in on the alien conspiracy long before the Majestic-12 documents were found and, since Monty Python was now among us, all was presented with a noticeable sense of the absurd.

  Newspaper production is a tactile experience. You break open the first bundle of papers and pull out copies of a new issue; ink comes off on your hands as you flick through the pages. No matter the politics, in that moment every publisher is Charles Foster Kane. It may end up lining a rubbish bin, but a new edition of a paper is a tangible object, a new creation, words, images and ideas given physical solidity.

  We had set up a new corporate structure and even moved offices to a second and third floor above a Pakistani fabric shop right in the heart of Soho’s Berwick Street Market – with no fewer than five pubs in a 100-yard radius. The SCREWING CAUSES CLAP headline, which was one of our first, and maybe our finest, pieces of tabloid dumb insolence, also proved that, in a weird way, we were in the business of street theatre. On publication day that cover was visible over and over again, thousands of times, on newsstands and in paper shops, in head-shops and hippie emporia all over the country. Just to take
a cab down Oxford Street was to see the headline, like an impish brandished fist, a dozen or more times.

  I must also give special credit to the London news vendors for putting it on display as usual, between Exchange & Mart and the Sporting Life, and not far from the New Musical Express and Melody Maker. What’s more, it moved like a motherfucker. The carriage trade just couldn’t resist its sheer stupidity, and picked up a copy as a gag along with the Evening Standard. For the two weeks the issue was on sale I couldn’t have been happier.

  Compared with the hectic times preceding them, the three years in the early Seventies that I spent at IT settled into an intense but manageable routine. To put it bluntly, Edward and I lounged around for one week, annoying the daytime staff, making phone calls, having meetings, taking care of business, thinking a lot and frequently going down the pub. As the second week began, we girded ourselves to put a paper together and pretty much did that between the Tuesday and the Friday, with maybe one break for sleep. It took between fifty and sixty hours to put an issue of IT together, and amphetamines and alcohol once more came into play. Paul Lewis, the editor, would sit down on the first floor, sorting and marking up copy, while up in the second-floor art room Caroline McKechnie and Shirley Divers hammered raw print, ready for pasting, from a pair of IBM typesetting machines. (Caroline was recruited from Clifton Gardens, and Shirley Divers was Larry Wallis’ girlfriend with the curly hair. In the end everyone was drafted. Joy came in as mysticism editor, den mother and office manager.) Edward and I were the conclusion of the process. Smelling of beer and Cow Gum, we actually laid out the finished artwork, while Gez shuttled from floor to floor, keeping the printer apprised of our progress and running out for sandwiches, fish and chips and Chinese take-aways.

  This Ford-like production line was considerably humanised by the people who dropped in. Some, like photographers and freelance illustrators, knew they had a better chance of getting their work published if they could hand something to either Edward or me that was instantly suitable to fill a space. Cartoons and line drawings might be executed right on the spot. Each visitation provided the excuse to stop work, roll a joint and, if the visitor was a special favourite – like George Snow, who brought us his pre-computer graphics, or Joe ‘Captain Snaps’ Stevens, who was our virtual house-photographer when not getting himself thrown into jail while doing a Friends photo-essay on the Provisional IRA – we’d even stop work and head for the pub.

  Not all the visitors to the IT offices were so benign. An underground newspaper is a magnet for all varieties of hustlers, psychos, panhandlers, seekers after truth, undercover policemen and extreme theorists who’d stopped taking the Thorazine. The panhandlers were no problem. We only handed out cash to a couple of indigenous, old-time Soho drunks. The hippie beggars could have a bunch of papers on credit and go out and sell them, but we didn’t have any bread to hand out, man. Among the real malcontents, we developed quite a reputation for throwing people down the steep flight of stairs that led to Berwick Street.

  Sadly, we couldn’t eject all the delegations from underground special interests from whom we regularly took flack. We had to sit and hear them out, as when we ran a cartoon satire about Bob Dylan’s lust for fame, and John Wilcox, the ‘Father of the Underground Press’, denounced us as anti-Semitic. On another occasion the Radical Feminists, a gang of angry, unshaven drag queens in clown make-up and heels, decided we were homophobic, trashed the art room and tore down our poster of a naked young woman on a Harley, a gift from Crazy Charlie of the Hell’s Angels. They also stole a prized item that was known as ‘The Pig Book’, a collection of photographs of a Danish performance artist who copulated with pigs. Never rivalled in her field, she totally eclipsed Karen Findlay, the New York performance artist who courted fame by introducing assorted fruit and veg into various bodily orifices, and we mourned its loss. When overly distressed or beleaguered, we would threaten to flame-out in kamikaze splendour by printing a double-spread excerpt from ‘The Pig Book’, but now our ultimate weapon was gone.

  When Edward and I unearthed a cache of early-Sixties, US trailer-trash girlie mags, and Irving Klaw-style absurdist bondage pictures, and started scattering them liberally through the paper, we innocently believed it would be treated as post-Warhol pop art. I know now that we were catching the same bus as Vivienne Westwood and Siouxsie Sioux, but we’d hopped on a couple of stops early. The full assault of the attitude squad descended on us, proclaiming us the worst counter-revolutionary, sexist thought-criminals this side of Russ Meyer. We were lectured for hours by women who’d later bond with the Angry Brigade, but, in just four years, the same images would be emblazoned on the sweaty T-shirts in the Roxy in London and CBGB’s in New York.

  Almost as soon as we stopped placating our enemies on the Left, we’d get hit from the other side by the police, most notably in the case of Nasty Tales. Gez, Edward and I had cooked up the idea of the comic-book Nasty Tales as a masterplan to ease our finances. Our grand money-making scheme was to put out a regular anthology of the top underground comics, both US and domestic. Nasty Tales would feature Robert Crumb, Gilbert Sheldon, Greg Irons, Spain Rodriguez and Rick Griffin, along with our own Chris Welch, Brian Boland and Edward, in the proper DC/Marvel format of a glossy colour cover and newsprint interior. It was an innocent little earner and, apart from the need to find top-flight material, should have all but run itself. It was a project that Edward and I could put together at our leisure and, like OZ, publish when we were good and ready. Instead, a completely unexpected criminal prosecution fell on us out of a cloudless Hiroshima sky, and the nagging possibility of jailtime became a resident mental background clutter for the next two years.

  Harry Palmer with a Warrant

  No one wanted to be the first to mention the eerie feeling that Sunday night. It was somehow too strong to be comfortably discussed. If no one else shared it, I might be losing my mind again, and if that was the case, I’d rather keep it quiet for as long as possible, thank you very much. That Boss was not only looking remote and preoccupied, but was quietly tidying away drugs into their hiding places and generally securing his room, caused me to break the as yet unspoken code of silence. Not wanting to alarm Ingrid, who was reading a book and seemingly unaware of any portents, I waylaid Boss on the stairs to the kitchen in the split-level flat.

  ‘This may sound weird . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to say it.’

  ‘Are we nuts, or what?’

  At approximately six forty-five the next morning the Special Branch walked in. Neither grim and judgemental like the Obscene Publications boys, nor spivvish, like the Jack-the-Lad drug squad, these were men of the hardest aura, and visibly carried 9mm Remingtons under their Crombie overcoats. The Heavy Mob. Remember a long-gone TV show called Callan that starred Edward Woodward? Or Michael Caine as Harry Palmer? These guys coming through our door were cut from the same cloth, only they were the real thing. As trouble went, we’d hit the big time and it was not an occasion for humour. Just look as frightened as you actually are.

  I suspect what Boss and I had credited to supernatural premonition was really a subconscious awareness that, for some days, our home in Clifton Gardens had been under surveillance. Not only by the Special Branch, but also, we discovered later, by the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Our friend the International Hashish Smuggler had passed through London a few days earlier and spent a couple of nights with us. What he didn’t tell us was that he was riding herd on a large shipment of Afghan hash destined for New York City, and what he didn’t know was that the deal was blown and Federal narcs had been following him halfway from Kabul. Throughout the previous few days law-enforcement agents from two countries had been all but tripping over each other outside the house.

  The situation at Clifton Gardens had changed slightly. I think Caroline was living at Felix’s place, while Boss and Paul Rudolph bunked in her room so that we could all make the rent and thrive in a modicum of style. The Special Branch hit Boss and Rudolph f
irst and then moved on to Ingrid and me. While we sat glumly in separate rooms, they turned the place upside down with great efficiency and minimal mess, but all they came up with was Boss’s Chairman Mao button, most of our drugs and reams of mildly subversive literature and documentation. Our understandable first reaction was that we were being raided for drugs, but we very quickly discovered that the warrant was for bomb-making equipment or evidence of a terrorist conspiracy. It was the period when a gang of urban guerrillas calling themselves the Angry Brigade had commenced a loony-tune terror bombing campaign by leaving an infernal device on the doorstep of Robert Carr, a Cabinet minister, and Special Branch were under the misapprehension that we might be them. Clearly disappointed with their haul of non-evidence, they served me with a second warrant for the IT offices. Before they took me away, I needed to piss and a detective came with me and watched. I tentatively asked what would happen next.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Well . . . about the drugs, for one thing.’

  ‘You think we’re interested in drugs, son?’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘We wouldn’t give those drug-squad slags the time of day.’

  With which he handed me the house collection of hash and pills.

  ‘Flush.’

  I dropped the dope into the bowl and flushed, then we went off to IT in an unmarked car. The production cycle had just finished and the place was a pigsty. Plainly the office was exactly what it claimed to be. A wretched hippie newspaper without a hope in hell of blowing up Cabinet ministers. Harry Palmer was again disappointed, and he and his mates sat me down.

  ‘The Angry Brigade?’

  ‘I honestly don’t have a clue.’